[Nottingham] Tape Backup Systems

[Martin]

David Bean wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 14:58 +0100, Michael Simms wrote:
>> The question I have these days is - WHY would anyone use a tape drive
>> any more!
> 
> Compare the sustained transfer rate of a hard disk to a tape. A modern
> Tape such as an LTO4 can outperform an equivalent external hard disk.
> One issue is that some combinations of RAID arrays, filesystems and file
> usage (lots of small files are bad) cannot provide data quick enough to
> keep up with the minimum streaming speed of a tape. 

Quote some numbers please?

And at what cost?

Would a similarly priced HDD or HDD cluster give similar performance?

And if small files are a problem for the destination drive, then just
use tar to make it all one big file... Just like on a tape...

A big advantage of the USB HDDs is that you have random access for
retrieving or checking any backup data.


The "high speed tape streaming" can also be a /problem/ if your source
disks cannot maintain the read rate required and the destination tape is
then forced to pause...


Whatever backups you use, you need to be sympathetic for the medium
being used...

Regards,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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